Microcredit involves extending small loans to poor people without collateral in order to help them pull themselves out of poverty. The brief defacement fails to explain how an idea that helped many people in the developing world might be applied to Facebook.

The alternative manifesto, appended with the hacker tag #hackercup2011, gained the thumbs up ("like") of more than 1800 people before the social network restored the boy-droid page to normal.

It's unclear how the hack took place, but weak password security by the team of minions maintaining the page is the most likely explanation.

The incident follows a similar hack on the profile of French President Nicolas Sarkozy earlier this week. A badly-worded update posted by miscreants falsely suggested Mr Carla Bruni would not seek re-election next year.

Screenshots of the Zuckerberg hack can be found in a blog post by net security firm Sophos here. ®